Lab 7
Electronic Books vs. the Printed Version
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Table of Contents:
Pre Lab:
Goals for the Lab:
The Evolving Concept
of a Book:
The modern view of
the printed document:
The rise of the electronic
document:
HTML 4.0 --Opening
the web to support the physically impaired and international access
Will the printed
book become obsolete, or is the WWW another fad like the hula hoop?
The electronic document
from the standpoint of the author
Early Internet history
-- Project Guttenberg:
The eBook:
The electronic document
from the point of view of the publisher:
The ED from the
view of government and industry:
Innovation in the
arts:
An
Exercise:
What is the view
of the library toward this phenomena?
The adaptation of
education and to the electronic document and the internet:
An
Exercise:
Distance
Learning:
Designing the Web
for accessibility of those with special needs:
The Future of Electronic
Documents:
Self Test of Lab Concepts:
Example:
Gallery of Student Essays:
Lab Instructions 7: Electronic Books
vs. the Printed Version
References:
How to Properly Reference,
Design, and Build Web Sites:
Glossary of New Terms:
Related Tutorials:
FAQs:
Other References:
Email
pkrolak@cs.uml.edu
Pre Lab:
The course to this point has presented its lessons as a series of labs.
These labs have been delivered in a variety of classroom settings, most
often in a computer laboratory with the instructor presenting material
and directing students using individual computers. This approach
is a distance learning paradigm, notable for its lack of a formal textbook.
This learning format features what the authors think of as a "Web book."
A Web book is a text based hypertext structure. The authors have contributed
the majority of the content but have made use of hyper links to materials
created by others where appropriate. The Web book is designed to be easy
to modify and change to keep pace with the rapidly evolving Internet and
World Wide Web. The publication cost is low and the format allows students
to scan quickly for concepts. Yet, a "Web book" is not an "ebook", an electronic
book designed to be downloaded into a computer like device that displays
the pages of the book. At this point, "ebooks" are prohibitively expensive
and a limited number of texts are available to download. This lab will
investigate whether it is time to consider the passing of the printed book
or whether as one humorist once said:
"The news of my demise has been greatly exaggerated."
Thus, we shall seek to determine the relative merits of electronic document
versus printed books.
Goals for the Lab:
The lab will discuss the electronic document and compare it to its printed
counterpart. The subject will be broadly interpreted to allow you to address
how this issue is likely to unfold in your lifetime. The issue of what
role distance learning will play in your long term continuing educational
needs, and personal and professional life is another avenue to investigate.
The goal will be for you to create a hypothesis related to the issues and
to use the tools presented in the course:
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to research the hypothesis,
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to carefully argue the hypothesis using information developed from libraries
and the Web,
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to logically summarize the hypothesis,
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to footnote and reference the sources.
The Evolving Concept of a Book:
In 1452, Guttenberg invented movable type and the printing press. After
that, the creation of books for education, science, religion, business
and commerce opened to a world emerging from the medieval period an opportunity
to rapidly spread ideas. Exploration of the new world, the rise of literature,
science, and radical political and religious change soon followed -- if
not as a direct result of this invention then at least assisted by the
intellectual elite having been freed from the drudgery of copying manuscripts
over and over by hand!
The modern view of the printed document:
By this time the concept of a printed book should be familiar to any college
student. The following are a few features of printed books:
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Books are designed to be read in a linear manner (each page to be read
in sequential order).
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Books are easy to read because the printed text is high contrast black
against a white background with crisp edges to enhance our pattern recognition
system.
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Books are easy to pick up and carry around to be read at our convenience.
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Books can be roughly handled.
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Books will withstand cold and hot temperatures.
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Aside from comfortable lighting, a book does not need a special environment
or source of power to use.
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Books allow us to make notes in the margin and highlight important ideas.
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Books are static documents; once it is printed the book does not change.
Thus a book has a well defined author and the author's intellectual property
rights are well understood.
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Books have been seen by many as a sensual experience: the smell, the feel
of a the paper and binding, the visual response to the font, cover and
illustration. The memory of being read to by parent and teacher evoke in
many some of the earliest and fondest pleasures. Libraries and curling
up to a warm fire with a book during a bitter night are experiences that
many educated people find safe and comforting.
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Books are an investment of capital and labor and hence the publishing process
has evolved a set of standards and codes to reduce the risk of this investment.
These codes and standards have often worked against the unknown writer;
but have insured that the reader receives a predictable quality product.
Radical ideas have to be reviewed and polished before the capital can be
teased out to support them. Vested, established authors and their publishers
have both intellectual and financial motives for resisting the advance
of the new, the heretical, the innovative.
The rise of the electronic document:
In contrast, the electronic book or document is a new and rapidly evolving
concept that is causing various aspects of our society to rethink many
policies. Intellectual property rights, what constitutes pornography, and
first amendment protection and ratings or controls as they apply to the
Internet are recent issues that have drawn public interest, federal legislation,
and judicial and executive review. Furthermore, the electronic book or
document as found on the Internet is seen to have many different features
from those of a printed book. For instance:
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Electronic Documents (EDs) are hypertext documents written using languages
such as Standard Generalized Markup Language, (SGML see 1,
and 2) and HTML. Documents
are displayed via browsers that could yield a different layout on a Macintosh,
a Windows PC, or a UNIX workstation. Are these differences important?
Current
browsers are based on HTML 4.0, but earlier versions of HTML gave only
limited control of fonts, placement and other layout issues. This meant
that each browser/computer had to interpret the document's appearance as
best it could, leading to sometimes highly variable display from one system
to another.
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EDs require hardware (computers), special software (browsers, viewers,
etc.), special devices (printers, sound), and network access.
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EDs are not easily taken with us to the beach, bed, or similar places that
we have taken books to read or study at leisure.
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EDs are designed to be linked together in such a fashion as to encourage
non-linear thinking, i.e. to jump from one page to another or from
one person's document to an other's as our interest dictates. Note that
a true SGML document -- unlike HTML -- may be quite large. For instance,
the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary has hundreds of thousands of entries and
breaking it up into HTML pages is awkward and cumbersome (See, for example,
Using
the World Wide Web to Deliver Complex Documents: Implications for Libraries,
by John Price-Wilkin).
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EDs can have images, videos, sounds, and interactions with other computers
(CGIs. JAVA) and other users.
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EDs are dynamic. Hence, the user may find different material in the document
at different times. This may not be a positive benefit, particularly if
there is no audit trail to indicate the nature of the change, when it was
made, and by whom.
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EDs can have many authors and the material may be copied and incorporated
from other EDs. As yet, ownership of intellectual property created
in this manner is still open to debate, but legislation and practice are
becoming standardized. The issue may eventually come down to the simple
point of whether copyright is practical to enforce or if it can even be
reduced to legal code under these circumstances.
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EDS are dynamic because the links outside of the web site are not controlled
by the author. Because the author of the page has linked to the work of
others, it could happen that the material that the author linked to could
be deleted, changed to become irrelevant, or even to something totally
embarrassing.
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EDs can be used in multiple window environments that allow inter window
linkages. For instance, we could place an author's poem in one window and
use the poem's words as links to a dictionary or other reference in another.
The words in the poem window could be high-lighted as the text was read
by the author and played through the computer's audio channel. (see for
a simple example the page -- Dynamic
texts for learning to read).
HTML 4.0 --Opening the web to support the physically
impaired and international access
The new HTML 4.0 standard seeks to address the address accessibility and
universality:
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the issue of improved access to the internet for the physically challenged.
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multi-lingual document support
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better document structure and presentation
Clearly the goals are worthwhile but EDs have only begun to address these
issues. For the vision impaired, how does the ED compare to books printed
in braille, or talking books (one could argue that talking books are a
form of ED). What can further be done to enhance the ED to increase access
for the physically challenged?
After making it possible for browsers to display documents in many languages
will it be possible to have intelligent translators to increase the world
wide readership? Some search engines and portals provide a limited range
of translation services now. What role will these HTML 4.0 EDs play in
expanding the Internet as an international marketplace?
Will the printed book become obsolete, or is the
WWW another fad like the hula hoop?
While the evidence is highly anecdotal, it is clear that the answer is
not obvious. The evidence may be subject also to interpretation. With the
aforementioned caveats we cite:
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Small bookstore chains are failing and cite changing reading habits and
competition from the online e-tailers (electronic retailers) like Amazon.Com,
as causes for their demise.
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The staid encyclopedia Brittanica is changing its emphasis from selling
its bound volumes to a market strategy of placing its content on the web
with its main revenue to be derived from advertising.
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The news media has watched a steady decline in viewers of the nightly news,
newspaper readership and advertising has also been dropping steadily. The
Internet news has created a new approach to journalism: publish an item
on the Internet on rumor -- pontificate and lionize it in the traditional
media on the confirmation. This trend started with Matt Drudge and the
www.drudgereport.com
breaking the Clinton & Monica affair over the Internet. Drudge, a Hollywood
reporter with no major newspaper affiliation, broke the story without the
usual confirmation required of a major newspaper.
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The U.S. Department of Commerce has decided to close the National Technical
Information Service (NTIS). NTIS was set up as the depository of government
reports and documents and was supposed to cover its cost by selling copies
of these reports.While in some sense, NTIS was in competition with the
Government Printing Office (GPO), the decision was attributed to an inability
to recover those costs and increasing competition from government agencies
setting up and distributing their reports through their own web sites.
See Commerce
to close National Technical Information Service for details.
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Copyrights are easy to protect if the mechanism to create the content is
slow, labor extensive, and requires large amounts of capital. The intelectual
property rights were under attack even before the advent of the WWW. The
capital and labor require to turn a small suburban newspaper or even a
college newspaper with color pictures has dropped from millions of dollars
to under a hundred thousand. On the WWW a similar investment creates a
web site that can offer an individual or special interest groups access
to millions of potential readers. Where there is no assets to seize or
difficult to locate, the copyright case is difficult to pursue when it
involves hundreds of small and transient web servers.
The electronic document from the standpoint of the
author
In the battle to become published, the first time author has an enormous
problem in finding a publisher willing to undertake the risks of backing
an unknown. The capital investment of turning a manuscript into a book
forces the publishing industry to turn to highly automated processes to
reduce the need for skilled, and very expensive, labor. The word processor,
local area network, design software, and the transfer of electronic copy
to highly automated presses has reduced the duplication effort and the
need for skilled labor with overlapping jurisdictions. Yet, for all the
automation there still remains the costly processes of editing and marketing.
The author often finds him or herself in a poor bargaining position. The
printed book also has its own separate time table that makes it difficult
to rush to print.
The electronic book is a different story. The book is in print almost
from the time of the manuscript's completion. The editing, artwork, and
layout use the same computer or no more than a handful of collaborators.
These people could be connected by the Internet and operate in a virtual
office sharing documents and work tools to create their product.
The author--for better or worse-- is in control of all aspects of the document,
provided he or she has the minimal capital to pay for the specialists to
make the manuscript web ready. Once the document is ready, it can be posted
to the Web, marketed via traditional advertising (print, television, and
radio), and, with techniques similar to shareware, distributed over the
Internet. No sophisticated distribution channels, no shares for jobbers,
wholesalers, and retailers. No expensive manufacturing operation to gear
up, no costly accounting and auditing. The electronic document can be edited
and revised for a fraction of the printed document, with no expensive inventory,
and no danger of going out of print. The final product is not subject to
environmental deterioration, does not require massive libraries to store
it, and never needs to be shredded and hauled to landfills. The author
creates, produces, and controls the marketing and distribution with a remarkably
simple system. The author is also the principle investor-- the one
who stands to make almost all the profit or take the loss. The system has
lower fixed cost of entry and lower cost of manufacture and distribution
compared to the printed version.
The choices of publishing mode for electronic books:
The electronic document that corresponds to the print book is now being
made available through several mechanisms:
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Sold as CD-Roms or attached to printed books
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Downloaded from the internet and either read on personal computer/workstations
or printed off the associated printer to be read as a normal book,
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Downloaded into a device that acts like an electronic slate, a special
purpose lap top computer like device.
Early Internet history -- Project Guttenberg:
The original idea for ED's may have flowed out of Project Guttenberg. In
the Guttenberg concept, books that were in the public domain, i.e. mostly
books that were out of copyright because of their age and out of print,
would be put up on the internet.
A project started in the early 1970s at the University of Illinois
by Michael Hart a research student working at the Super Computer Center.
When he was granted a $100 Millions in computer time for training, he sought
to create a project that would be worthy of such a generous gift. Michael
conceived the idea of restoring to the world all the classic books that
had gone out of print and were no longer in copyright. He gathered a large
number of volunteers to copy the original printed classics over into ASCII
text files and publish them over the internet. Thus preserving and making
thousands of classical fiction and non fictional texts on the WWW for future
generations.
As a result of Project Guttenberg, many publisher's are now putting
their outdated technical books on the web to develop a following for their
authors. Books once converted or generated in electronic form can be located
by using search engines and downloaded. Once downloaded to the user's
computer they can be read, searched, used online or printed on the reader's
printer. These electronic document are in plain ASCII text and the books
are referred to as etexts.
For a more definitive history of Project Guttenberg see:
History and Philosophy
of Project Guttenberg
The eBook:
Recently the electronic document that is equivalent to a printed book and
has a format that is closer to the layout and style of the printed book
has come to the market place. The electronic book that results is called
an eBook and may or may not be designed as a hypertext document. Most are
designed to be read linearly but use hyper text linking to go from page
to page. Ebooks
span the standard printed book market from fiction to non fiction.
The electronic slate:
Think of a lap top computer simplified for use as a document reader
and you have a good mental image of the eBook readers that are coming to
market. Current market price is around $5-600 and can be the size of a
paperback to a large legal pad. Some of these slates allow for using a
stylist to write notes in the margin. If the concept catches on the price
can like be expected to drop dramatically. The weight and battery life
will probably follow the lap top market and the display will also follow
apace. People on the go with large reading requirements are the major targets
for the product. The current slates hold about 4000 pages or about 10 ebooks.
eBooks can be downloaded from the internet in most case for a fee.
The eBook standard:
A standard for publishing eBooks, was undertaken by the National Institute
of Standards and Technology, NIST, and the eBook industry in late 1998.
The new standard is called Open eBook. This is a necessary first step for
a fledgling industry to adopt a standard that everyone can utilize and
design product around. Without such standards the early market is too fragmented
to generate the user base. No one is willing to carry two or more of the
readers around for multiple formats. Microsoft has agreed to adopt the
standard and has announce plans for making its software look like paper
on the desktop soon.
For more information on eBooks see:
PubSpace -- Commercial
Publishing Redefined
An internet author, Simon Buckingham's thoughts,
Traditional Versus Electronic Publishing
Business Week, E-Books:
A Library on Your Lap, (1998) Article reviews the various approaches
to electronic slates.
Open eBook Initiative
Books.com - Electronic
Library The electronic library an extensive list of available eBooks.
The electronic document from the point of view of
the publisher:
The publisher is not a philanthropist that publishes interesting ideas.
Publishing is an industry that must produce a profit. Hence, it must find
a product that the majority of people want to read, at price that reflects
the risks of undertaking and a fair profit margin. The novel, the off beat,
the unpopular don't often meet the above standard. However, the book is
still the wide choice for most readers and probably will be for sometime
to come. The publisher does many positive things to assist those authors
it chooses to invest in,
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assists in getting the book finished and edited to assure its readers of
a quality product,
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determines the style and design of every part of the book to again maximizes
it appeal to its target market,
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designs the marketing channel to get synergism with its other related products,
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produces the advertising, the book tours to promote the author and the
book,
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produces additional materials such as study guides, view graphs, and even
a CD-ROM of additional background materials that were too extensive to
include in the original book, and
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it protects the author and itself against copyright infringement and other
attacks on the intellectual property and acquires whatever permissions
needed for use of other's materials.
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in recent years, the printed book has been established as legally different
from its electronic forms -- web publication, eBooks, databases, etc. This
is leading to publishers seeking to control and develop separate projects
for these various electronic forms. Intelectual property rights in contracts
now reflect this separation from traditional print books.
For more material on the publishing industry and its role:
Introduction to the
publishing industry, by Alpeda - the multimedia Course (1998)
The ED from the view of government and industry:
The CALS program was a complex collection of standards and procedures to
move government and industry to a paper less operation. The government
is being forced into this position by examples such as the following:
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if the modern aircraft carrier carried onboard all the documents needed
to operate and repair its necessary components and weapons and if they
were all paper the ship would sink.
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weapons such as the B52 bomber designed in the 1940's and now planned to
be operational well into the twenty first century has design and other
documents that are now so deteriorated and aged that they are almost unreadable.
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the planning, procurement, acquisition, and field of a modern weapon system
may generate over a million documents that may be needed for decades
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large government projects can involve thousands of pages of documents,
forms, filings, etc. that must be reviewed and revised before they can
move to completion. Special interest groups and legal challenges also add
to the documentation.
The original goals of a paper-less government is not even close to
being achieved, but great progress has been made. Electronic Document Interface
(EDI), a standard for electronic documents that can be exchanged between
businesses and government entities over the web. EDI is appearing in the
governments bidding, contracting, and business methods. Commercial de facto
standards, like Acrobat, have over taken the development cycle of the CALS
project and are being adopted by both government and industry. CAD, electronic
word processing, and other tools have greatly eased the posting of many
government required reports to the web. So much so that the NTIS agency
is being closed down by the Department of Commerce.
The legal and judicial system also are poised to enter a new era that
will move the courts toward a sophisticated user of the web. The 1998 decisions
involving the president's impeachment and other legal issues be posted
to the web broke new ground and it can be assume that more will follow.
Millions of copies of the evidence were downloaded and reviewed with computer
aided tools to allow various media teams a rapid response to the documents.
See these articles for more information:
Innovation in the arts:
The labs of the remainder of the course will focus on innovation, creation
of, and presentation of ideas on the web. The design of web content is
an essential skill for any corporation seeking to become an e-tailer, the
presentation of ourselves to other is an essential skill for business and
our personal life, the need to be creative and to able to seek unique expression
is essential to be a human.
Art:
For those who do not live in major metropolitan areas, a trip to a
museum or art gallery is a seldom or never experienced event. Great art
and the experience of seeing a complete survey of a major artist, criticism
and commentary, historical perspectives are now to be found on the web.
Virtual tours of major museums and collection, lectures, criticism, etc.
are now emerging to inspire and educate.
The computer graphic artist is now just beginning to explore this new
medium and examine its potential when joined with other forms of multi
media.
Music:
Music is slightly more accessible to youth but formal music -- symphony,
opera, and musicals are still only available in the urban areas where there
is a sound base of financial support and the necessary audiences. New web
radio channels will open up a wider selection and more diverse audience
from both a regional and cultural stand point.
The ability to learn and appreciate music is under attact in many of
our schools. To play and to enjoy music in all forms is one of life's pleasures.
The computer and the emerging generation of recording and sound editing
tools will open new audio experiences.
Napster - a pirate or electronic Robin Hood?
Napster was started in the late 1990's as a portal for trading MP3's,
digital recordings that were compressed, reproduced, and sent over the
Internet with no loss in quality. Created originally by a Northeastern
University undergraduate Napster became an overnight success and soon millions
of downloaded MP3's were happening every month. Napster provided a central
site that made the location of the desired recordings and the downloading
a very simple task. Universities in some cases banned Napster clients because
Napster was overloading their communication and storage resources.
Music publishers began to see for the first time a decline in revenues.
The recording industry undertook a series of lawsuits that have recently
forced Napster to stop the trading of copy right material. While this legal
battle was being waged a variety of alternatives were being pursued by
both sides, one creates an underground network of web sites that will facilitate
the continued trading of MP3's while offering no capital source (no corporation)
to attack for penalties (Lots of legal pain for no lawyer's gain). The
other approach is to create an electronic document that is like shareware
-- not of perfect quality or its full function that will expire after a
short time or a few uses and can be digitally marked to prevent its being
copied. Like shareware the music, program, or video can be restored or
become fully functional by paying a fee and registering it. The battle
will pit nerd against nerd with the music and video publishers investing
million of dollars to protect their investments.
Literature:
The development of the public library provides access books, both fiction
and non fiction, reference materials, newspapers, magazines, and journals
available to anyone for free. This has made almost all segments aware and
familiar with past and current writers. What is important is that some
classical literature, though Project Guttenberg and other efforts, is being
preserved and revisited because of the web. That the commercial world was
not sufficiently motivated to keep these books in print because of return
on investment considerations is only of secondary interest. Project Guttenberg
is preserving and making accessible rare books and old cultures that will
be lost if not for this army of volunteers transferring the information
to electronic form.
In addition, the current authors are not simply satisfied to publish
their material on the web. The more daring are exploring the implications
for hypertext like navigation of a plot. For example, letting the reader
pick and chose potential choices for the character and events within the
flow of the reading to investigate interactive novels. Poetry that has
the text dynamically change and evolve to match the author's flow of ideas,
or the readers movement or focus of the mouse cursor give the poem both
a sense of movement and visual feeling that is different from static, printed
poetry.
The merger of text, sound and other multimedia, and user interaction
is now just beginning to be explored and the form is still in its early
stages.
An Exercise:
For some insight into this early experimentation:
Look at the site : http://www.atlasmagazine.com/win97_f3.html
Try clicking on the leaves and snow links. Put your headphones on and listen
to the music. Go to the various artists from Cyberbilly. Note the image
map. Explore the different photographer's sites.
Try the site http://www.nutrishnia.org/.
Move your mouse over the various objects and observe the behavior. You
will need your headphones.
What is the view of the library toward this phenomena?
The modern library is seeking to understand and to come to grips with the
WWW, reading trends, and information needs. Books are still being selected
and acquired as previously; but the trend in reference material is moving
in the direction of an e-Services. In e-Services the user pays for information
sources taken from the net either as a monthly subscription, by the article,
or by the search. This trend is seen in Brittanica moving supply its information
over the Internet rather than its traditional printed volumes.
Issues of storage and cataloguing:
For the library the care and restoration of rare and old books is a
battle against the pollution that is in the air, the chemicals used to
manufacture the paper, etc. Fire, flood, and other natural disasters also
take their toll on printed matter. Due to the costs of involved libraries
must preform a triage on which materials to preserve. This action requries
the librarian to chose those books to be discarded, which of the rare and
often beautiful documents and books to be restored, preserved and secured,
and most important how to provide access to the public .
On the other hand the electronic document may now to be something that
will be around for perpetuity. This is not an accurate concept if the electronic
media is magnetic. Magnetic media needs care and restoration as well. The
properly stored material if it has error correcting codes etc. can simplify
the task. Storage technology based on laser encoded plastic, i.e. CD_ROMs,
appear to have lifetimes measured in centuries and should eventually solve
this problem.
Cataloguing is another problem and potentially serious one. If the matter
is printed it is relatively easy to catalogue. It is not subject to change
while its on the self, the electronic document particularly one on the
WWW may be changed by the author or by someone else. If the document is
not in a situation that tracks such changes, then the catalogue may be
hopelessly compromised. As time goes on the computer archives will grow
so large that finding the desired document will major advances in search
and retrievial technology.
Education's adoption of electronic document and
the Internet:
The WWW has transformed education in many ways. The web has made so much
information available to anyone with a computer and internet access that
the poor and the disadvantaged may never be able to compete in the market
place. American schools have as a goal to be online and with community
support the goal is being reached in many places; but the poor rural
and urban areas as a group are noticeably failing to attain the goal. The
computer is not an end in and of itself; but, it is a tool for bring information,
concepts, and opportunity to the student. The computer is the central force
behind so many processes in modern life. Yet, in many areas the computer
has not penetrated our school curriculums in a thoughtful and creative
manner. Again we see those that can recognize this need generating web
based solutions for K-12 education.
See as an example of K-12 site for support of creative and innovation
education:
The Learning Portal, The Study Web, http://www.studyweb.com/index2.htm.
An Exercise:
Dynamic texts for
learning to read Go to this site and examine the book, Little
Bo Peep. Have your ears on. Follow the directions and click on
the words in the poem. What happens?
If
you liked Little Bo Peep, try any of these others (Need headphone for full
effect). Look at the other books designed to help make
reading more fun and interesting to children. Do you feel it is a successful
strategy?
Distance Learning:
During the 1960s and 70s, the University of Illinois, with NSF and
corporation support set off to deliver education over over the cable television
networks. The project was called Project Plato; and for its time offered
a number of highly creative educational experiments in courseware. Project
Plato had hoped to offer education for $0.50/hr. per student ( in 1960s
dollars). For reasons that are not really relevant to the present lab,
Plato never quite lived up to or achieved its goals.
Project Plato was based on numerous technicological advances:
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the emerging technology of interactive cable television,
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supercomputers, and
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a new computer display built around a device called the plasma display,
The Plato terminal had a clear glass screen that could have video material
projected through it. The screen was actually a plasma display (made of
two pieces of glass with the separation being filled with neon gas that
could be be caused to glow in little addressable spots. The plasma panel
was flat and text and graphics could be made to appear on it in a yellow
glow. A laser grid around the outside of the screen created a touch panel
with the resolution of a child's finger. It could also play audio and video
files. Plato courses in biology and veterinary medicine made full use of
all of the Plato terminal's features and demonstrated 1.) biology classes
that did not require dissection of frogs, etc. 2.) a lab for veterinary
students that projected a sick animal on the screen and the students could
place a stethoscope on the animal and hear the actual heart sounds of the
animal as they were recorded at the same spot. Plato set in motion the
concept of distance learning, i.e. offering education over a network to
a dispersed population of learners.
The military with its constant need to train and update a workforce
on highly technical weapons, large industrial firms with complex marketing
and training needs, and large state university systems have all participated
in advancing the vision of training and education over a network. The models
for this courseware delivery has been a mixture of many high and low technology
approaches. Video conferencing, WWW, and the rapidly diminishing costs
for massive memory and computer power, and advances in the theory and software
of Computer Based Instruction (CBI) have now made it possible to deliver
distance learning that is affordable and efficient.
Programs like the University of Massachusetts Lowell's Cyber Education
are now rapidly advancing the state of the art. This current course is
but one of nearly a hundred full credit courses offered over the internet
to an international student body. Each passing month and semester see more
and more industries and university joining the distance learning providers.
For background on the various approaches to distance learning see:
Designing the Web for accessibility of those with
special needs:
The internet offers great opportunity for special needs populations because
it can be adapted to their needs. However, many web sites are designed
in such a way as to frustrate this potential. The WWW standards groups
have promoted the cause of accessibility, but until recently these accessibility
issues were ignored or not considered in the design of the web site. This
lesson is too short to address the topic fully but the paper by Rice cited
below is an excellent starting point for coming to grips with the creation
of acccessible web sites.
Accessibility design references that should be read and become a standard
approach to you web designs:
The Future of Electronic Documents:
It is a brave person that sets out to gaze into the future of so rapidly
evolving a field but the following should be read and carefully considered:
See New Information
Publishing Constructs, by Alpeda - the multimedia Course (1998).
Self Test of Lab Concepts:
Example:
Gallery of Student Essays:
A sampling of student thought on how electronic documents are changing
our education, business, and society.
Lab Instructions 7: Electronic Books
vs. the Printed Version
The above brief discussion gives some examples of differences between printed
books and EDs. Use the Internet and the library to research the following
topic:
Discuss and contrast the printed book versus the ED as a learning tool
in your major or minor field of study. Use a table to display the advantages
and disadvantages. Give at least two examples of EDs that you found on
the Internet that illustrate a novel teaching method or one that showed
a specific advantage over the printed book.
The assigned project is to be done as a multiple web page and must include
a Bibliography (include journal articles, books, and WWW pages).
Use links to sites that support your argument and your two examples of
novel learning methods.
For extra credit, discuss which gave you the greatest assistance with this
paper: the library or the Internet? Why?
As a suggested starting point, visit:
The above list should provide ideas and keywords to be used in search engines
such as: Alta Vista, Infoseek, and Excite.
Use the Electronic style guide to correctly reference all links and
web documents (see for example Citing
Electronic Sources).
References:
How to Properly Reference, Design, and Build Web
Sites:
Glossary of New Terms:
Distance learning -- delivery of education and training using the
internet to facilitate the delivery of learning to remote locations or
at least at a distance to the educational system.
E-Book -- an electronic version of a printed book (general use).
More precisely an electronic book done in the Open eBook Innitiative standard.
E-tail/E-commerce -- Electronic retailing over the WWW. In the
past several years this concept is rapidly expanding to become a multi-billion
dollar business.
E-Service -- Concept of charging a client for a small fee for
every use of the server. The little fee done millions of times add up to
significant total revenues.
E-text -- An book converted to ASCII text format by Project Guttenberg
volunteers. These books are normally out of print and out of copyright
manuscripts.
NIST -- National Institute for Standards and Technology, formerly
the National Bureau of Standards, and agency of the United States Department
of Commerce charged with assisting in the creation and certification of
standards.
National Technical Information Service (NTIS) -- government agency
that printed and distributed reports and other documents that is being
phased out e-government delivering services electronically.
Project Guttenberg-- A
project started in the early 1970s at the University of Illinois by Michael
Hart when he was granted a $100 Millions in computer time for training.
Michael decided he should undertake something worthy of such an investment
and conceived the idea of restoring to the world all the classic
books that had gone out of print and were no longer in copyright. Volunteers
copy the printed book over into ASCII text files and publish them over
the internet.
Project Plato -- A 1960-70s project also conceived at the University
of Illinois and funded by NSF. Plato sought to deliver education
over the cable television network (interactively by using a two way connection).
The project also created the Plato terminal that was innovative even thirty
years later. The Plato terminal had a clear glass screen that could have
video material projected on it. The screen was actually a plasma display
(made of two pieces of glass with the middle being filled with neon gas
that could be be caused to glow in little addressable spots). The plasma
panel was flat and text and graphics could be made to appear on it in a
yellow glow. A laser grid around the outside of the screen created a touch
panel with the resolution of a child's finger. It could also play audio
files. Plato courses in biology and veterinary medicine made full use of
all of the Plato terminal's features and demonstrated 1.) biology classes
that did not require dissection of frogs, etc. 2.) a lab for veterinary
students that projected a sick animal on the screen and the students could
place a stethoscope on the animal and hear the actual heart sounds of the
animal as they were recorded at the same spot.
Related Tutorials:
FAQs:
Other References:
Other References:
Netscape's
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